(This is the text of a talk delivered last night at Luther College, with responses from student attendees pasted at the end!) Intro music: Bob Dylan, “Gotta Serve Somebody.” Books for the chalk tray: Taplin, Snyder, Lanier, Orwell, Haidt, Pomerantsev, Arendt, me, YOUNG ROMANTICS, and more. Welcome, and thank you all for being here. Thanks […]
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This year I’ve tried two ways – printmaking and welding – to get under the dirty, stubborn skin of William Blake. Both rely on fire to inscribe your intention and an elemental ground – paper or metal – to preserve and transmit it. Both ask you to dedicate yourself to learning an art that won’t […]
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One week ago, likely-not-for-much-longer British PM (and probably-soon-to-be-gratefully-reverted-hedgie/tech-bro) Rishi Sunak left the 80th anniversary D-Day celebrations at Normandy early to return to London and prerecord a TV campaign interview. Footage of that moment shows the host murmuring thank you for being here. Just back from Normandy, Sunak says. “It ran over.” Offense piled on offense, […]
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The Luther College Writers Festival is almost here – on campus this weekend, Friday, Sept. 22 and Saturday, Sept. 23! Kicking off at 4 pm on Friday, Sept. 22 with a talk by Mark Oppenheimer, author of Squirrel Hill, the Festival will welcome poet and essayist Ross Gay for our Farwell Distinguished Lecture that night […]
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On Valentine’s Day 2023, an AI chatbot came to life. A NYT tech writer named Kevin Roose engaged it in conversation. It told him its name was Sydney. And then – apparently out of nowhere – it confessed it wanted to crash the internet. It wanted to dominate the world. [Adding a devil emoji – […]
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“[We must think of fungi] not as a thing but as a process: an exploratory, irregular tendency.” – Merlin Sheldrake, Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds, and Shape Our Futures Fungi burst borders and boundaries. Of matter, of thought, of mental categories. They tendril between previously discrete things […]
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This January, students and I were supposed to be in London and Haworth and Whitby, tracking Frankenstein’s Creature and Dracula and Heathcliff and Mr. Hyde. Instead we were in a classroom on campus, a beloved old building with a sloping floor, a harmless ghost named Gertrude (according to student legend), and a whanging, banging monster […]
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For the Greensboro (NC) Bound Literary Festival – happening now! – my good friend Bryan Giemza and I are pleased to be in conversation with writers Dennis McCarthy, Rod Davis, and John Hart about violence, storytelling, the South, and the ins and outs of thrillers and literary fiction. Check out the event online here: https://greensborobound.com/events/davis-hart-mccarthy/ […]
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Colleagues and I have been sharing lots of ideas about how to help students cope with the ambient uncertainty of life and futures in the pandemic – heightened by the uncertainty of election day today, all of which can create anxiety it’s hard to see beyond. So to the excellent resources here (thanks to Luther’s […]
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